Doctor Oz Pharmaceutical Companies Exposed; 4 Things Drug Companies Don’t Want You To Know About. rug Companies Under Estimate Dangerous Side Effects, Drug Companies Control Much of the Information Your Doctor Gets About A Drug, You’re Often Prescribed Drugs You Don’t Need, Drugs Target the Symptom Not the Cause;

Dr. Oz and his experts uncover the disturbing secrets drug companies are hiding. Dr. John Abramson, author of “Overdosed America” and Dr. LaMattina “Drug Truths”. Deadly drug interactions, the more drugs you take the more risks you have, are doctors prescribing drugs you don’t need? Are drug companies inventing diseases to make money?

Today is a very controversial episode on Dr. Oz and I imagine there is going to be a lot of back lashing going on after this airs today from doctors and pharmaceutical companies. So in case you missed Dr. Oz today below is a full recap of the issues talked about with the drug companies and how we are made to believe we need drugs!

Dr. Abramson said today it is the drug industry’s job to sell drugs!

Dr. John Abramson , Lecturer, Harvard University, Consultant U.S. Dept. Of Justice & Consultant, FBI: Dr. John Abramson believes that Americans are over diagnosed and overmedicated. In his book Overdosed America: The Broken Promise of American Medicine, Dr. Abramson investigates the commercialization of medicine at every stage, from deceptive clinical trials to aggressive pharmaceutical advertising.

John L. LaMattina, PhD, retired as president of Pfizer Global Research and Development in 2007 where he managed more than 13,000 scientists and support professionals in the United States, Europe, and Asia. LaMattina has received numerous awards including an Honorary Doctor of Science degree from the University of New Hampshire. He is also the author of DRUG TRUTHS: DISPELLING THE MYTHS ABOUT (PHARMA)R&D and a senior partner at PureTech Ventures.

Today Dr. Oz had a table full of containers and bottle of pills and said that it is probably a fraction of the prescription drugs one would take in a lifetime. Now I am not implying he had maybe a couple hundred pills on display, he had thousands of pills…We are nation obsessed with taking pills. Thus leads Dr. Oz to tell us what drug companies don’t want us to know.

He started of talking about Orlistat found in weight loss pills Alli & Xenical, but now the FDA is being pressured to yank it off the market, hidden inside this pill could be a nightmare in disguise says Oz. Orlistat has been linked to severe liver disease, acute pancreatic damage and kidney stones.

Dr. Adriane Fugh-Berman Director of PharmedOut, that is dedicated to educating doctors about pharmaceutical marketing. PharmedOut is one of the watchdogs exposing secrets that that drug companies don’t want you to know about, and there are some that will shock you said Oz.

Dr. Adriane Fugh-Berman said that pharmaceutical companies actually invented specific diseases or conditions and it’s not only diseases that have been invented, but categories have been changed. Anytime a disease category is expanded it increases the number of people who are eligible for drug treatment. Right now much of the prescribing in the United States is not rational, people are being prescribed drugs which the risks out weigh the benefits.

If you have after watched tv you can attest to this, just pay attention to any commercial for cholesterol, ED, birth control pills, etc., etc., when they get to the side effects of the drug they are promoting you say to yourself, “I wouldn’t want to take that, you must be crazy!.

Dr. Oz said we take for granted that the drugs we’re prescribed are safe and necessary, but that might not always be the case. Americans are too dependant on drugs and yet we’re still sick.

Dr. Oz 4 Things Drug Companies Don’t Want You To Know About

Dr. John Abramson says he got into the FDA’s Data about Vioxx and Celebrex and realized the articles in our most trusted journals that told us about Vioxx and Celebrex were wrong. It a dangerous drug and doctors didn’t know it and when he tried to tell his college’s they thought he was crazy. He said he tried to talk about it, tried to get the info out and couldn’t get it out, so he wrote a book.

Dr. LaMattina said the pharmaceutical industry has a major role discovering and developing new medications. The need for new drugs particularly now is becoming important to the baby boomers as they get older. There is no doubt there are side effects with drugs, we have to balance that side effect occurrence with the benefit that drug produces.

We are in for a great debate with the first of four secrets the drug industry doesn’t want you to know about;

1. Drug Companies Under Estimate Dangerous Side Effects
2. Drug Companies Control Much of the Information Your Doctor Gets About A Drug
3. You’re Often Prescribed Drugs You Don’t Need
4. Drugs Target the Symptom Not the Cause

In the Dr. Oz audience were women who are some of the more common drugs that we have in America right now, weight loss, blood pressure, cholesterol, acid reflux. Oz asked how many had a serious side effect from being on one of those drugs? About a third of them stood.

Oz asked Abramson how common is it for folks to have life threatening side effects from them?

Abramson said the drug companies own the data, it’s like their playing poker and they can see the cards and they don’t have to show it to the doctors, they don’t have to show it to the consumers, they often do even show it to the authors of the articles – evidence in the journals that doctors trust. (Now that is SCARY)

Karen from the studio audience stood and spoke about Alli, she has been taking Alli for about a year now, and Dr. Oz asked her if she was aware of the life threatening side effects of Alli and she said she wasn’t. She said she was shocked, It’s FDA approved, her doctor put her daughter on Alli to lose weight as well.

Dr. Abramson said almost all the information that the doctors have and the consumers have is coming directly or indirectly from the drug companies.

Dr. Oz confronted Dr. LaMattina saying there are side effects from drugs but what about patients who have died from medications that have been initially approved and safe by the FDA. He asked him if there is a safety net to prevent us from making or to falsely believe to take something without really having to pay for it.

Dr. LaMattina said he would also contend that some of the scenarios Dr. Abramson described were more back in the late 1990’s and the early part of this decade. A lot has changed since then, every clinical trial that is run by a pharmaceutical company is now on the web, you cannot start a clinical trial without registering on clinicaltrials.org. There you will find what trials work and what trials don’t work and the negative results and report side effects. Any side effect that gets reported by a doctor has to be reported to the pharmaceutical company within seventy two hours of those side effects being recognized from around the world.

Dr. Oz asked the makers of Alli, Xenical – is your product safe, they declined to be with Oz today on the show but here is their statement ” Orlistat is the most extensively studied weight loss medication on the market, and its safety has been demonstrated…” -Roche Pharmaceuticals

They are saying it os ok said Oz but how can both of theses be true. In fairness to the manufacturers of these products Oz says there has been 13 cases of liver failure, but there have been 40 million people treated. The question in Dr. Oz’s mind is it possible we have to weigh the deaths of a few people to help so many others?

Dr. LaMattina said it is a tough equation to make!

Oz stood up and said the more drugs you take the more risks you have, the more drugs you take for that reason the ore chance of adverse side effect from drugs interacting with each other. He went on to say the average person takes 12 prescriptions a year.

Dr. oz then through a commercial ad at everyone and said it just baffles him. He went on to say to use generic drugs because they have been around a long time, their old drugs and they’ve been used by so many people that even if their uncommon we know about these side effects and their cheaper too.

Dr. Abramson said that about 85% of clinical trials are funded by the drug industry and they own data like coke cola owns the recipe for coke. So the doctors don’t understand their getting a selected filtered version of what the information is.

Dr. Oz asked Dr. LaMattina is this really possible that much of the information that comes to people is actually coming through the filter or the lens of a drug company?

Dr. LaMattina said to Abramson their is some truth to what he said about ten or twelve years ago, but you can now go to the website and unlike the coke cola recipe FDA gets every bit of the data that’s generated.

Dr. Oz cut Dr. LaMattina off and said this year there was a very provocative article that came out in the American Medical Association and it was about anti depressant medications and he put a quote up on the screen which read “True drug effects were non-existent to negligible among depressed patients with mild, moderate and even severe symptoms.” -JAMA

Dr. Oz said what their saying is the anti depressant drugs didn’t work. What these folks did is pull together all the data that had been submitted to the FDA but never published. How is it possible drug companies can get away with that?

Dr. LaMattina said when you run a trial for depression there is a tremendous placebo effect. When people start seeing their physician on a regular basis, even if their taking a sugar pill, their feeling better. You need to run 5 phased three clinical studies to get the FDA to approve that drug.

Dr. Oz asked Dr. LaMattina if he or a loved one had mild depression would you put them antidepressant medications?

Dr. LaMattina said first he would be worried about having a child with depression even if it was described as moderate, I would look to have that child treated because you don’t know if that is going to progress.

Dr. Abramson said evidence has shown these drugs have increased suicidal thinking in kids and young adults. So were getting no benefit and risk.

Gwen Olsen said pharmaceutical reps are well trained and she sells and gives free medications to doctors and said every physician has a dollar value, and as a rep you look for high volume prescribers and you court those physicians so to speak.

Dr. oz said to make sure you’re getting the right drug for yourself you have to be cautious about the samples you get at the doctors office. Those products are given out to start you on the process of using products, sometimes more expensive than they have to be, they’re free the pharmaceutical company is trying to promote it, it’s not always in your best interest, step back when people push free products.

Dr. Oz Are Drug Companies Guilty Of Creating A New Disease To Sell You Drugs

Your often prescribed drugs you don’t need- Dr. Oz says that drug companies are inventing diseases and it’s called disease mongering, hyping up conditions tat really aren’t diseases. You see these in commercials about overactive bladder, osteopenia, excessive daytime sleepiness etc. They are problems but do they really need drugs.

Dr. Abramson said this is a wide spread practice in the industry, the drug industry job is to sell drugs, they get the drugs approved on the market for an indication that is truly helpful and then broaden the marketing so that you get to a much greater population of people who are a candidate for your drug.

Dr. LaMattina said that just can’t invent a disease, it’s impossible to do, you can’t convince physicians and the FDA that there’s a new disease. To assume we can just go in and them there’s a new disease is ludicrous. You just don’t sit around and invent a disease.

Dr. Oz says you really need to sit and ask yourself do really have this problem, do I really need to have this happen to me. From now ask yourself this question “What is the real symptom that I was having that the drug company is talking about, when did I start it?

Drugs target the symptom not the cause – Dr. Abramson said reflux drugs are very powerful that have side effects, there is more pneumonia in people who take these reflux drugs because it kills the bacteria in the stomach and before proton pumps people did pretty well with less potent antacids and we need to watch what we eat, look at the position we sleep in, sometimes people need them occasionally but not all the time.

Statin Drugs – people from heart disease benefit from statins – 50 high risk men over 5 years taking a statin and one heart attack will be prevented. Women who don’t have heart disease the guidelines themselves said they didn’t have evidence to show that statins protect women who don’t have heart disease from having a heart attack.

Dr. Oz said to Abramson “So, if a female does not have heart disease is prescribed a statin drug, your arguing there is no data to support that benefit Sir?

Abramson said the guidelines themselves say clinical evidence to support these recommendations for women is generally lacking and the recommendations are made on the extrapulation of data. To the extent of the drug companies releasing the data there’s 11,000 primary prevention women for whom the data has been released, no benefit!

The real problem is not that their taking statins unnecessarily, if women exercise regularly, eat a heathy diet, don’t smoke and drink in moderation they can prevent heart disease by 83%, the problem is all the women aren’t getting the message that you can prevent heart disease

Dr. LaMattina said there is no doubt that if make lifestyle changes, and like Dr. Oz said why are physicians prescribing statins to women.

Dr. Oz thanked Dr. LaMattina for coming to the show and standing up for his beliefs and said he wants to know the answer to that question.

Dr. LaMattina said to Dr. oz you answer it, how do you prescribe statins?

Dr. Oz said he is the one who is usually taking them off statins.

Dr. Oz’s Guide To Prescription Drugs

Dr. Oz’s advice for everyone is; If your not going to study the drug your taking against the lifestyle change, I’d think twice about taking it, and gently push us doctors on these issues because when you go in there and say your taking 7 medications, you have an 80% risk of drug interaction, don’ think twice about it.

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